Sex, politics and broken promises grabbed headlines in Lexington in 1893
Editor’s Note: As Lexington celebrates the 250th anniversary of its founding, the Herald-Leader and kentucky.com each day throughout 2025 will share interesting facts about our hometown. Compiled by Liz Carey, all are notable moments in the city’s history - some funny, some sad, others heartbreaking or celebratory, and some just downright strange.
Think career-ending political scandals involving sex, lies and broken promises are a truly 21st century thing? Well, think again.
Lexingtonians got a preview of the #MeToo movement back in 1893.
It all started with a chance meeting between Madelaine Pollard, a mousy but smart young woman, and WP Breckinridge, a Lexington politician and cousin to John Breckinridge, vice president under James Buchanan and a five-term Congressman.
Pollard was the daughter of a saddle-maker whose shop also sold newspapers and magazines. An avid reader, Pollard was an excellent student who dreamed of becoming a writer.
When her father unexpectedly died, his passing sent her family into dire straits. After living with aunts, she decided to find a way to continue her education by finding a man to pay for her college.
A local farmer agreed to fund her higher education dreams in exchange for marrying him or repaying him once she graduated.
Not long after enrolling in Cincinnati’s Wesleyan College, she began to question the deal and started looking for a way out of the deal.
Enter WP Breckinridge.
Col. William Campbell Preston Breckinridge was at the time a 47-year-old Confederate veteran who aspired to the presidency. The twice-married, father of five was described as having a “dignified, almost fatherly, bearing, his courtly manners, his earnest, warm-hearted friendliness, his sparkling appreciative eyes, his ready intelligence, broad cultivation and quick, harmless wit make him a universal favorite.”
In April 1884, Pollard recognized Breckinridge on a train to Lexington. She struck up a conversation with him and after their chance meeting, sent him a letter asking for his advice on how to deal with her college payment arrangement.
Breckinridge was only too happy to help. At the time, he was running for Congress and saw it as a way to help a constituent.
He traveled to Cincinnati Wesleyan to talk to Pollard in person. However, Breckinridge suggested that it was a “confidential” matter and urged her to speak to him out of sight of the school’s chaperones.
The two subsequently left campus that night in a closed carriage. While that may not seem like much of a thing in 2025, during the Victorian era, no woman would ever be alone in a closed carriage with any man they were related to.
Later he also convinced Pollard to meet him in Lexington, where he met and seduced her.
It was the beginning of a long relationship between the two, as Pollard became Col. Breckinridge’s mistress, and Breckinridge became a Congressman. She transferred to the Sayre Female Institute in Lexington at his request so she could be closer to him when he was in town.
He paid for her tuition and board over the next three years, and the two met frequently. Pollard also gave birth to two children during that time. Breckinridge sent her to lying-in homes (places where unwed mothers could stay out of the public eye).
Pollard would later say that Breckinridge insisted she give them up as he couldn’t have them traced to him. Both of the children died in infant asylums.
In 1887, Breckinridge moved Pollard to Washington, D.C., where he got her a job with the U.S. Department of Agriculture and Census Bureau. The two continued their relationship now meeting several times a week. Breckinridge would introduce Pollard to friends as his fiancée or his daughter. He was still married to his second wife, Issa Desha. However, Pollard told friends that he was as careful of her and her reputation as he would have been his daughter’s. He told her that he would marry her if he were free to do so.
In 1892, when Desha died, Breckinridge proposed the two marry after a suitable mourning period. Pollard agreed. Later that same year, she became pregnant for the third time. Breckinridge swore to her, she said, that he would accept the child as his and they would marry. The couple set about picking baby names and set a wedding date for May 31, 1893.
However, a month before the wedding, Breckinridge secretly married Louise Scott Wing, a DC widow and distant cousin. When Pollard learned he’d betrayed her, she miscarried. Realizing she’s been lied to for nearly 10 years, she decided to sue him for breach of promise.
It was one of the biggest political scandals of the Gilded Age. Pollard asked for $50,000 (nearly $2 million today). She claimed his act of breaking his promise to marry meant that she would not be able to get a good job, live in a good home or ever expect to marry.
At the time, marriage was really a woman’s primary career and being too old to marry posed daunting financial problems.
Breckinridge’s attorney claimed Pollard was “utterly depraved where morality is concerned” and was fair game to his actions. In his defense, they said she was nothing more than a prostitute who had deliberately lured him into an affair, as she was not someone an influential Congressman would ever willingly associate with.
He even went so far as to deny his fathered any children with her and had no knowledge she’d even had them.
Pollard countered by saying she was a naïve young girl who’d been betrayed by an older, manipulative man. Her testimony revealed all of their secrets – that they had secretly had a decade-long affair, that he had seduced her and promised marriage, then secretly married a cousin less than a year after his second wife’s death.
Naturally, the case spurred a media frenzy. Reporters and investigators ran all over Lexington and Kentucky looking for anyone who knew Pollard.
Breckinridge even hired a spy to find out what kind of a woman Pollard was. In press reports the case revolved around either Pollard being a knowing, gold-digger who’d do anything to stay out of poverty, or an innocent schoolgirl who was the victim of a much more powerful man.
At the end of the trial, Breckinridge’s attorneys framed Pollard as a “self-acknowledged prostitute.” But the judge charged the jury (which were always all white men at the time) to hold Breckinridge up as an example.
And the jury obliged.
After less than 90 minutes, the jury found in Pollard’s favor and awarded her $15,000 (or about three times what Breckinridge was making as a representative at the time). Breckinridge naturally appealed and requested a new trial. Both motions were denied.
Defeated, Breckinridge returned to Kentucky to run for re-election. By that time, he’d served as a Congressman for four terms. This time was different. He was declared a rapist, lust fiend and wild beast in search of prey by newspapers, civic associations and religious groups.
The sordid affair not only shone light on his bad behavior, it was also a catalyst for the women’s suffrage and women’s rights movement in Kentucky.
In the early 1890s, women in Kentucky couldn’t own property and couldn’t vote. In fact, anything they owned prior to a marriage, or the wages they made during a marriage, were considered to belong to their husbands when they did marry.
Legislation in 1894 changed that and allowed married women to own property, make contract, and to sue or be sued in their own right.
Pollard’s case brought to light the economic inequality women faced and women across the state began to take an interest in politics. And they began to target Breckinridge.
Women by the thousands protested his campaign, boycotted businesses that supported him and parents refused to allow the sons of his supporters to date their daughter. After Pollard’s victory, a letter signed “Many Women” ran on the front page of the Kentucky Leader urging Democratic Party leaders to withdraw their support for his re-election.
They said: “Let him sink into the oblivion of his guilt. Let his voice be silent.”
Breckinridge begged for forgiveness, saying, “I have sinned, and I repent in sackcloth and ashes.” But it wasn’t enough. He lost the election by 255 votes and never held public office again.
Pollard moved to London and lived quietly for the rest of her life. She met a wealthy Irish widow named Violet Hassard, and the two became lifelong friends traveling the world together. The 1901 English census in Oxford, list Pollard, with the occupation of “writer of fiction/author.”
Her place of burial is unknown.
Prior to Pollard’s suit, Victorian America viewed women differently. At that time, women got married, stayed home and never had sex.
By the end of the trial, men and women across the country viewed her as a younger woman taken advantage of by an older, more powerful man who used his money and influence to corrupt her. It changed the way the country looked at relationships between men with money and power and the women around them.
Have a question or story idea related to Lexington’s 250-year history? Let us know at 250LexKy@gmail.com
This story was originally published April 22, 2025 at 8:23 AM.
